Beginnings
by Remember.E
Summary: Nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted." There was a slight pause, and for one glorious yet strangely wistful moment, he believed she'd taken him seriously and left.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: Not being Chris Carter, I own nothing.

* * *

Beginnings

Special Agent Fox Mulder was nervous and trying desperately to convince himself that that was all right. After all, what was the world coming to if a man couldn't be nervous in his own office? He stubbed his toe against the foot of his desk, swore silently, gave up pacing and sat down, fingers carefully pressed against his temples. He had been nervous for the better part of six hours now, and he was beginning to develop the makings of what promised to be a fine headache. He didn't like being nervous. Impending migraines aside, it reminded him that as hard as he tried, he would never truly be in charge of his circumstances. Circumstances such as the one he was currently in.

The phone call had come in at exactly 9.08 that morning. Mulder knew this because he had been on time for once, and 8 minutes was how long it took him to walk from the car park to his office in the building basement. Eight minutes, he marvelled. Eight minutes, and just like that, his life had been turned completely upside down.

He did not want a new partner. No, he amended, fingers still covering his eyes. He did not _need _a new partner. He had survived the past one year just fine working on his own, and he was fully confident that he would survive the next fifty or so still flying solo. It had been rough going for a while when Diana first left, but he had grown accustomed to entering an empty office every day. In time, he had even learned to enjoy it. Being alone was… well, lonely sometimes, but Fox Mulder was a man who valued his privacy, especially since most of the Bureau thought he was insane anyway.

He had devoted his life to investigating cases that every other self-respecting agent tossed aside without a second thought. Cases that involved aliens, crop-circles, spaceships, chasing after shadows in the dark, and anything else the Bureau conveniently labelled under "paranormal". Cases that led him all over the country in pursuit of strange sightings and dubious suspects. Cases that steadily reinforced his belief that the government knew of _things_ - he hated using vague terms like that, but lacking any concrete evidence, it was the best he had come up with as of yet - which they kept secret from the American population. Cases that he personally referred to as "X-Files". Cases that he was very sure his new partner would neither understand nor support. In fact, now that he thought of it, this new partner of his was probably nothing more than another attempt by his superiors to debunk his work, to shut him down for good, to spare themselves any further embarrassment that might spring from his… unconventional investigations.

He rubbed his eyes wearily and let his hands drop to the desk in front of him. As if that wasn't enough, his soon-to-be partner was apparently a woman. He didn't have anything against women, not personally, anyway. He seriously doubted, though, that she would be happy sharing his office space with him. To begin with, he worked in the basement - a far cry from her cosy little office over in Quantico, he suspected. To add insult to injury, his office was a perpetual mess. Even he had to acknowledge as much. Looking around, he noticed afresh the unsteady piles of books stacked haphazardly on every available surface, the week's collection of Styrofoam coffee cups assembled at his elbow, and the crumpled paper balls lying around the almost-empty trash bin. Personally speaking, he was perfectly contented with the way things were. Despite the eternal mess, he knew exactly where everything was, and contrary to popular opinion, if he was unable to find what he was looking for, it was usually because someone had moved it, not because he had misplaced it. As a general rule, most men understood that. Women, on the other hand… women took his mess as a personal insult. He wasn't too sure why, but he was quite certain that Dana Scully would prove no exception.

At least she had a nice name. Mulder had no idea what she looked like - the less professional part of him was hoping for long legs and lots of curves - but he knew that she was smart, to say the least. The phone call had come through at 9.08 a.m., three digits that were now irrevocably emblazoned in his brain. At 9.11, he was frantically calling everyone he knew who was even remotely friendly towards him, as well as some who weren't, trying desperately to convince someone - anyone - who was in any position to pull strings that he was quite capable of taking care of himself, thank you very much. By 10.30, he had run out of names and was seriously contemplating breaking Bureau protocol and buying himself a drink with a substantial amount of alcohol in it. He compromised with two cups of the strongest, blackest coffee he could coax from the coffee machine on the ground floor. By 12.30, he knew they had him beat, at least for now. The headache began shortly after. At 1.30, he picked up the phone again, dialled Archives, and requested a copy of Special Agent Dana Scully's senior thesis or the equivalent, anything that would give him some idea of how the woman's mind worked. He spent the next two hours reading through the copy of her thesis that the lady at Archives had obligingly faxed over. By 4.00, he knew for sure that whatever else she might be, Dana Scully was no bimbo.

Fox Mulder was a very intelligent man. He had graduated from high school a full year ahead of the rest of his class. Three years later, he entered Oxford University to study psychology and graduated _suma cum laud _with First Class Honours. That same year, he entered the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. Upon graduating, he began working with the Behavioural Science Unit, specializing in the Violent Crimes division. By 1990, he had become something of an intra-Bureau legend. He was always three jumps ahead of the others, his supervisors would say, shaking their heads in admiration. It was deemed a huge blow to the Violent Crimes section when he made the sudden and very unpopular decision to concentrate solely on the X-Files.

Bad PR aside, though, Mulder was still one of the most brilliant agents to ever darken the Bureau's doors. He knew quality when he saw it, and Dana Scully's work was of the very highest. It was the most intelligent piece of writing he had read in a long time. He finished reading through it, then leaned back in his chair, idly tapping his pen against his temple. She was good. For one fraction of a moment, he reconsidered all the running around he had done since 9.08 that morning. Then he shook himself briskly, running one hand through his thick, dark hair.

If she was coming, she was coming. He'd already wasted nearly the entire day worrying about it. There was nothing he could do about it anymore, but he certainly wasn't going to let that stand in the way of him getting at least a little work done that day. Rolling his sleeves up to his elbows and fishing his glasses out of the top desk drawer, he turned to his projector and began carefully arranging his newest series of slides, making sure that the sides were evenly aligned so that they would move smoothly from one to the next.

He was on his second-last slide when he heard the knock.

Shit. Expecting it didn't make it any easier.

He took a deep breath and let it out again.

"Sorry," he called, "nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted."

Well, it was worth a shot. There was a slight pause, and for one glorious yet strangely wistful moment, he believed she'd taken him seriously and left. Then, the door eased open, and he knew he had no choice but to turn around.


	2. Chapter 2

He raised his eyes to look at her. Almost immediately, he realized that he didn't have to look up quite as far as he'd thought. She was… short. Before he had time to digest anything else, though, she had taken two quick steps forwards and was standing directly in front of him.

"Agent Mulder." She smiled, her voice coolly professional as she held out her hand. "I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you."

He took her proffered hand and shook it energetically, risking a quick once-over as he did. She was small, so small that closing the distance between him and the door hadn't helped, not by much, anyway. Bright blue eyes met his squarely, framed by shoulder-length hair of a colour he couldn't quite identify and therefore assumed was some shade of red. Momentarily fazed by the quiet confidence in those eyes, it took him a second to realize that she, too, was looking him up and down.

"Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded?" he said easily, making a mental note to delay standing up for as long as possible. He had, throughout his thirty-one years, met people who were to varying degrees touchy about their heights. On several occasions, he had discovered that the hard way. Until he knew a little more about Dana Scully, he wasn't going to chance doing so again. "So, who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?"

She looked at him strangely. Did she not realize that working in the basement wasn't exactly a step up the ladder of success? "Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you." Oh, she _didn't_. Either that, or she was being extremely diplomatic. "I've heard a lot about you."

Mulder took that in his stride. He knew the talk that went round in FBI circles about him and his work. _Spooky Mulder. Thinks there're little green men living on Mars. Did you hear what happened to his sister? What happened, or what he thinks happened?_ "Oh really?" He eyed her warily. "I was under the impression…" He paused, then threw caution to the wind. "… that you were sent to spy on me." He leaned back in his chair, waiting to see how she would react.

One immaculately made-up brow lifted. "If you have any doubts about my qualifications or credentials," she began heatedly, but he cut her off mid-sentence.

Now that she was already upset with him, he supposed he could go ahead and stand, so he did. He winced. It was worse than he'd thought. Even in those impossibly high heels she was wearing, he towered a good eight inches or so above her. Did she even reach his shoulder? He didn't know, and he didn't think that now was the time to find out. He had put her thesis with a pile of unfinished paperwork on his desk after reading it and perched his telephone on top of everything to hold it together. Reaching over, he lifted the makeshift paperweight and extracted the document.

"You're a medical doctor," he recited. "You teach at the Academy." It was amazing how much information one could glean from a morning spent in frantic phone calls. "You did your undergraduate degree in physics." Taking off his glasses, he gestured towards the sheaf of papers in his hand. "'Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation. Dana Scully, Senior Thesis.'" He looked up from the title page in honest admiration. "Now that's a credential, rewriting Einstein."

She crossed her arms, looking slightly mollified. "Did you bother to read it?"

"I did," he assured her. "I liked it." Crossing the room, he picked up his slide canister and fitted it carefully into the projector. "It's just that in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seem to apply."

Both her eyebrows shot up this time, and he felt rather than saw her glare. Unperturbed, he walked past her and turned off the lights, plunging the room into a darkness only marginally relieved by the weak sunlight filtering through the high windows.

"Maybe I can get your medical opinion on this, though." Making his way back to the projector, he switched it on, and the first of his carefully arranged slides flashed onto the view screen. A young woman lay face forwards on a forest floor, her light blonde hair tangled with dirt and leaves. "Oregon female, age twenty-one, no explainable cause of death." He glanced over at Scully, who was standing beside the screen, her face dimly illuminated by the pale blueish light. "Autopsy shows nothing. Zip." With a click, the second slide moved into place, showing a close-up of the girl's back. "There are, however, these two distinct marks on her lower back. Doctor Scully, can you ID these marks?"

He watched as Scully stepped closer to the screen and surveyed the two small, raised bumps on the girl's back with a practiced eye. "Needle punctures, maybe." She tilted her head slightly, as if scrutinizing the marks from a different angle. "An animal bite. Electrocution of some kind." Her voice was confident. She was not asking questions; she was offering explanations.

"How's your chemistry?" Mulder switched over to the third slide, which showed the intricately crossed lines of a molecular diagram. "This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue."

She hesitated. "It's organic." A troubled look flickered across her face. "I don't know, is it some kind of synthetic protein?"

Mulder shrugged honestly as he changed the slide again. "Beats me, I've never seen it before either. But here it is again in Sturgis, South Dakota." This time it was a boy, sprawled facedown on a railroad track, his plaid shirt lifted to expose the tell tale bumps on his lower back. "And again in Shamrock, Texas."

Scully looked at him. "Do you have a theory?"

He smiled. "I have plenty of theories." Whether or not she would accept any of them, to be sure, was an entirely different matter. He had known Dana Scully for all of ten minutes, but he was already fairly certain that she would match him blow for blow, argument for argument. Assuming, of course, that she didn't leave his office and head straight for Kersh's to demand instant reassignment to some other, less deranged, partner. In all honesty, he wasn't too sure which to hope for. Either way, though, it was time to test the waters a little bit more. "Maybe what you can explain to me is why it's bureau policy to label these cases as 'unexplained phenomenon' and ignore them. Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?"

He allowed the last few words to taper off in an eerie whisper, and she smiled in spite of herself.

"Logically, I would have to say 'no'."

Mulder nodded, undisturbed. She was a medical doctor, a scientist; he hadn't expected her to agree.

"Given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft's capabilities--"

For the second time, Mulder cut her off, although not without some vestige of regret. He knew it was rude, but he had heard the argument a few too many times. "Conventional wisdom. You know this Oregon female? She's the fourth person in her graduating class to die under mysterious circumstances. Now, when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?"

Scully met his eyes fiercely, apparently undisturbed by the fact that she had to tilt her head back in order to do so. "The girl obviously died of something. If it was natural causes, it's plausible that there was something missed in the post-mortem."

Mulder watched her, torn between amusement and exasperation.

"If she was murdered," Scully continued, oblivious to his quandary, "it's plausible there was a sloppy investigation. What I find _fantastic--_" she looked at him severely "-- is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look."

Surrendering to amusement, Mulder smiled. "That's why they put the 'I' in 'FBI'," he quipped. Walking back to his desk, he sat down. "See you tomorrow morning, Scully, bright and early. We leave for the very _plausible_ state of Oregon at 8 a.m."

If she could take potshots at him, so could he. To his surprise, she didn't retort. Instead, she smiled, albeit somewhat enigmatically, then turned and left, closing the door behind her. He listened as the brisk _click-clack_ of her high heels echoed and faded down the hallway. How she could even move in those things, he had no idea.

Shaking his head, he leaned over and turned the projector off. Working with Dana Scully was going to be interesting, very interesting indeed.


End file.
